![]() “Enchanted Strings” also makes clear the influences that shaped Baker and his work, and the techniques he created that in turn influenced others. “We were trying to write the definitive history of Bob’s theater while trying to clean up the archives and understanding it for a brand-new group of puppeteers that never experienced Bob,” Metz says. ![]() Paperwork, such as the press releases, show notes, design sketches, and other material, was a different story. I looked around and noticed that all of the boxes were very finely labeled with what was in them.” “He goes, ‘Oh, no problem.’ He went to a cabinet, opened it up, and he had a whole bolt of the original fabric. “I said, ‘How are ever going to find this material?’” Metz says. “I remember one of the first jobs I had there was redoing a costume on a puppet from the ’30s. “One of the things he taught me was to be highly organized,” he says. ![]() Other material published in the book or used for research came from the theater’s archives, which, required a lot of digging to make sense of, Metz says.īaker, Metz says, was very good at organizing his workspace, and much less so when it came to documentation. Scores of photographs, artist sketches, and other documents fill the pages of “Enchanted Strings,” many of them from the collection Baker gave the Los Angeles Public Library. As an adolescent, he was helping backstage in local puppet theaters, including the Teatro Torito on Olvera Street. The book includes a sweet letter written by Disney’s secretary in response, as well as an entire chapter of Baker’s later work for Disney and Disneyland, which included animated Disney movie character puppets in window displays at the theme park and for many years a line of limited-editon Disney character puppets.īy 10, he had taken over a garage at his family’s Echo Park home and was producing his own puppet shows.Īny time one of the big puppetry companies such as the Yale Puppeteers came through town, Baker was there. When he was 8, Baker wrote Walt Disney to ask if he could “look around” his Hyperion Avenue studio. Department stores in Los Angeles often hosted puppet shows for shoppers’ children and decorated their window displays with puppets too. “Enchanted Strings” turns back time to 1924, when Baker was born, and then follows him and the world of puppetry in Los Angeles to the present day.īaker was 5 when he saw his first puppet show at a furniture and housewares store. “They asked me, ‘Can you recreate in the book, telling the history of the theater as though you’re with Bob, in the early morning hours, listening to him?’” Metz says. “They started thinking about a book, and they started looking at what I had done,” says Metz, whose previous books include “A Century of California Puppetry: How the West was Strung.”Īlex Evans, executive director and head puppeteer at the Bob Baker theater, approached Metz to write the book with the idea that in addition to Baker’s life, it should tell the story of the theater and many of the unsung puppeteers and artists who’d worked with Baker. ![]() A few years ago as plans for a book began to develop, Metz was contacted as a possibility to write the history of the theater, which opened in 1963. He worked for Baker for four years in the late ’80s, while keeping his job at Children’s Fairyland, where he’s been director of Storybook Puppet Theater since 1991.īaker died in 2014, but the Bob Baker Marionette Theater continues. Metz had seen Baker at puppetry conventions as far back as 1970, and then later on he’d watch Baker’s occasional visits to Children’s Fairyland, where Metz had talked its longtime director Lewis Mahlmann into letting him work while still a schoolboy.īut around the time Metz graduated from San Francisco State University in the early ’80s, he got to know Baker when both ended up doing puppet shows at the Humboldt County Fair one summer.Īt the end of the fair, Baker offered Metz a job. ![]()
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